So wrap your tiny, innocent, untainted hands
in my own bloodied, worn out, unpure ones
and let me protect you from
those to come

You’re beautiful but you’re dying, he told her.

I know, she said quite simply. And she knew.

~

She saw him in her mind's eye saying, "You are too sick for words," and then he would push a button and she would disappear into thin air.

"You’re transparent."

And she cried, "Yes, I know! But I don’t know how to fill up all these extra spaces.  I don’t want to be seen! I don’t want you to see inside me but I don’t know how to cover up these bones!"

I tried to stop thinking.

Maybe I was losing my identity; maybe what I ought to worry about, I decided, was where I was heading. What did I want to be, and who did I want to be with?

Both questions began to depress me.

The trouble is, I wonder if I really feel something, or if I imagine that I feel something. And if I really feel things, why am I always wondering if this is the way things really feel?

[Fragment]

"I'm scared because I'm angry and I'm angry because I'm scared."

He looked at me and his eyes filled with tears. "Does that make any sense?"

"Perfect sense."

I was convinced that boys- all loose shoes and leather palms- don't care for fragile girls.
The kind that etched lotuses onto weedy waists, lost in the tangle of fine bones and became a brush fire of flowing sentences.
Boys want to drive themselves into flesh and wide hips that swing in circles like a pendulum.
-
See, us fragile girls, we grew thick skin before permanent teeth.
Our skin bubbles with the mind-numbing cocktail of anger and sadness and guilt.
-

He took all my razors

and buried them in the loaf of raisin bread

that sat in the very back of the freezer,

because he knew I hated raisins.



Once we even

watered our lawn with coffee instead.

If it makes you feel better, he says, then do it.



Tonight, when I turn out the lights,

I kiss him like a talisman.

Instead of pulling my shirt over my head

like he normally does, he hands me

a flower. He makes me tear off each petal,

one by one, but instead of repeating

He loves me, he loves me not, he makes me say

I will not **** myself, I will not **** myself

over and over again for every petal,

until all that's left

is a stem as thin as the lifelines on my hips.

I've come to the conclusion that

the scar on your left knuckle

and the string of bruises you wear on your wrist like a bracelet

is connected to the crush of your father's fist

against your mothers chin when he's drunk.



The map of  your neighborhood

was already circled in red for all the places

you could possibly go to avoid

slurred phone calls in the middle of work

full of stuttering apologies.



You overheard your mother talking with your brother once

when you were eight. How do I get out? she asked.

I don’t know, he replied. How does anyone?

But there are over seventy shades of blue in the world,

and not a single one of them matches the sound of your fathers voice

when he murmurs I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.